Led into World War I by its generals, Germany was unprepared to fight a maritime conflict despite possessing the world’s second largest navy.
y German historians have argued that the force propelling Berlin to war was fear at the top of a slide to the left in the Reichstag, the German parliament. It had begun with the 1912 elections that for the first time produced a center-left majority generally opposed to the established ruling order.In Germany, the army, with Kaiser Wilhelm II at its head, was supreme; a frequent prewar joke was that Germany was an army with a country attached. But in 1913, the new Reichstag majority challenged the generals by passing a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg after he supported the army’s action in overturning a decision by a civilian court against an officer who had beaten a civilian.
While the Reichstag did not have the power to bring down the government, which would have been the case in Britain, the issue exposed the fact that the Kaiser—really the German Army—was the effective government of Germany. Moreover, the vote dramatized a developing threat to the country’s authoritarian political establishment.
The army’s means of maintaining electoral power and ending the drift to the left was to wage a successful war. In 1871, victory over France had created a unified Germany, demonstrating that wars could be fought purely for internal political ends. The nature of the German government thus shaped the coming conflict.
Consequences of Naval Expansion
In 1912, just after the elections, the army General Staff secured funding for a military buildup to wage the war it was contemplating. It convinced the pliable Kaiser that Germany needed to fight to preempt Russian military modernization. Unfortunately for the Germans, the General Staff thought entirely in land terms; the generals seemed unaware they also were courting war at sea.
The 1912 army buildup largely came at the expense of the hitherto massive German naval building program. British scholars usually have considered this shift in defense spending from the navy to the army evidence that the Germans knew they could not win the naval arms race with Britain. To the General Staff, however, the big, modern Imperial German Navy was nothing more than a drain on manpower and money. It never was part of the war planning, which was the purview of the General Staff, and no naval operation figured into the war plan activated in August 1914. To the extent that the architect of the naval expansion, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, considered what the service would do during the coming conflict, he hoped to fight a decisive battle relatively close to the German coast. The more professional British Admiralty would see no point in risking its fleet there.
The British viewed the German naval buildup as a mortal threat. For about a quarter century, the Royal Navy had educated the British public to understand that Britain depended on the sea for her survival; for example, most of its food came from overseas. Britain might enter a big European war to maintain the Continental balance of power, in accordance with centuries-old policy, but its participation likely would be limited. Germany’s big new fleet, however, made British entry into the coming conflict inevitable. That, in turn, made the sort of quick victory the General Staff sought impossible, because the German Army, no matter how brilliantly it might perform in France and Russia, simply could not leap the Channel.
The U-boat War
How does a land power defeat a sea power so that the former can free itself to fight on land? The Germans knew as well as the British that Great Britain would live or die depending on how well it could supply itself by sea. When war broke out, Germany deployed cruisers and converted merchant ships to attack British shipping, but they were relatively ineffective, and by late 1915, all German overseas bases had been captured.
By that time, the Germans had realized that submarines could operate freely despite Royal Navy dominance. This reality drove Berlin toward a U-boat campaign against British trade. U-boats were most effective when they were allowed to sink merchant ships without warning, but submarine commanders found it difficult to identify their prey. Inevitably, they sank ships that should have been sacrosanct—ocean liners and neutral vessels—and the most important neutral country was the United States. Beginning in April 1915 with the sinking of the British liner Lusitania and the drowning deaths of 1,198 passengers—including 128 Americans—the U.S. government threatened drastic action every time a U-boat killed its citizens. In September, the German Navy pulled back to prosecute a less effective albeit less risky U-boat campaign.
By the end of 1916, Germany’s situation was increasingly grim; the armies on the Western Front were deadlocked, the German fleet was virtually trapped in its home port, and the British blockade was causing food shortages. Something drastic had to be done. As long as Britain was in the war, it could continue to channel the world’s resources to its Continental allies from across the seas that the Royal Navy still dominated.
The German Navy informed the General Staff that, freed of restrictions, U-boats could starve Britain out of the war within six months. The Germans were aware that such a campaign almost certainly would bring the United States, with its vast resources, into the war on the Allied side. With that understanding, the Germans sought some means of neutralizing U.S. power. An offer of an alliance with Mexico if the United States declared war on Germany might work; Berlin promised the Mexicans their “lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” Surely Mexican attacks across the border would tie down U.S. power.
The plan turned out to be a gross miscalculation. The offer (contained in the Zimmermann Telegram) was exposed, and in combination with Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, it propelled the United States into the war. As for the Mexicans, they saw little point in attacking their hugely powerful neighbor.
The question for the Germans was whether they could starve Britain out of the war before U.S. strength could make itself felt in Europe. Meanwhile, the German government had to reckon with the British blockade. Although it was leaky, the demands of the war made it effective enough to impose great stress on the country. The German announcement that its unleashed U-boats would hasten the end of the war was, not least, a way of reassuring the country’s civilians that their sacrifices had not been pointless. Otherwise, they might begin to question why the war had begun in the first place.
Claims of U-boat sinkings were widely published in Germany. Meanwhile, the British pointed to measures to replace lost merchant ships. They were able to appropriate neutral ships and to order large numbers of new merchant ships abroad. When the United States entered the war, its considerable fleet of merchant ships, already built up to exploit wartime demand, became available. In the fall of 1917, news of these transfers caused members of the Reichstag to question the course of the war.
The measure usually credited with winning the shipping war was adopting a convoy system. Soon after the United States joined the conflict, the U.S. Navy dispatched destroyers to Britain to serve as convoy escorts. U.S. ports became convoy assembly points. The United States began to mass produce destroyers; by the fall of 1918, British estimates of Allied naval requirements showed a dominant U.S. destroyer contribution.
Born of Desperation
For the German General Staff, the question was whether Germany could sustain the war in the face of the British blockade. Its solution was first to win the war on the Eastern Front by fomenting communist revolution in Russia. The Germans permitted Russian revolutionaries, including Vladimir Lenin, to travel in a sealed railroad car from Switzerland across Germany and via ferry to Sweden. The revolutionaries proceeded to Finland and then to Petrograd (St. Petersburg).
With Russia out of the war, the large German army on the Eastern Front could move west, to defeat France and Britain on land before U.S. troops arrived in large numbers to support the Allies. At least as important, Germany would gain large Ukrainian resources to help offset the blockade-induced shortages. Lenin’s revolution came in November 1917, by which time the U-boat war already was fading.
In the spring of 1918, the German General Staff had to face the real possibility that the communist revolution it had facilitated in Russia could spread west into Germany. With troops from the Eastern Front having reinforced Germany’s armies in France, the generals saw a spring 1918 offensive on the Western Front as the country’s last best chance for victory. When it failed, the German troops had to retreat to more defensible lines.
The General Staff had missed the point. Whatever its enlarged army could accomplish on the Western Front likely would not end the war. U.S. industry and the U.S. Army were just gearing up. As long as the Allies could use the Atlantic freely, they could continue the war. Perhaps not in France, but possibly along the flanks of German-controlled territory. That was what sea power offered.
Theater of Opportunity
By late 1917, Germany’s Central Power allies—Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire—had begun to crumble. U-boats deployed in the Mediterranean were still effective (much more so than in the North Sea and the Atlantic), but it must have been clear that by the end of 1918 they would be tamed. U.S. naval forces, and to an extent Japanese destroyers, added enough strength to British and French forces to make Mediterranean convoying effective. The Russian Revolution had provided the Germans with potential additional strength in the form of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, but the United States’ entry into the war had brought U.S. battleships to the Grand Fleet, and consequently additional British battleships to the Mediterranean.
Success in the Mediterranean offered the Allies a great opportunity. Since 1915, a largely French army had faced Bulgarian troops on the Salonika Front in northern Greece. The Mediterranean U-boat war had limited the force’s strength, but as the submarines were defeated, the army could be built up. A real prospect was that the southern force, after being resupplied and reinforced by sea, could strike north, liberating Serbia, advancing through Austria, and invading Germany—exactly the kind of peripheral operation naval dominance makes possible.
In effect, the situation in the Mediterranean in the fall of 1918 demonstrated what could have happened had the British succeeded at Gallipoli in 1915. Then, they had hoped to open a supply route to Russia while knocking the Ottoman Empire, as well as Austria-Hungary, out of the war. Now Russia was in chaos, but naval victory in the Mediterranean still offered a route into southern Germany.
The French often have argued that the threat from the south, from the Salonika army they had insisted on maintaining despite the pressure on the Western Front, tipped the Germans into abandoning the war. In his memoirs, General Erich Ludendorff, a leader of the German war effort, agreed. He believed that the German armies in France, once they had retreated to more defensible positions, could have stood off attacks in 1919. But after the collapse of Bulgaria, no Central Power troops were available to defend the south.
In the End
World War I began as an attempt by the German General Staff to stave off the burgeoning power of liberal forces within the country. It now appears that when Ludendorff and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg told the Kaiser on 29 September 1918 that an immediate armistice (not a surrender) was necessary, their primary objective was to prevent the destruction of the army, which would mean the destruction of the authoritarian German political establishment. Parts of the army soon would be used to put down socialist revolutions in Germany that in large measure had spread from Russia—the fruits of the General Staff’s act of desperation.
The same General Staff managed to evade any responsibility for either starting the war or for losing it. In particular, it managed to avoid blame for having missed the significance of Allied sea power, the force that made it impossible for Germany to win the war.
In early 1919, pamphlets appeared in Berlin titled “Tirpitz, Gravedigger of Germany.” The author had that right. By threatening the vital British interest in sea power, Tirpitz had ensured that the big war would be maritime, and that Germany would lose.
This article largely is based on research done to write my book Fighting the Great War at Sea (Naval Institute Press, 2014). What follows is a sampling, mainly of printed sources. The most unfamiliar part of the article is the argument that the army was central in leading Germany to war and that in the end it sought an armistice rather than risk destruction. My sources for the primacy of the German Army and its role in fomenting the war are works by German historians beginning with Fritz Fischer in the 1960s (War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 [Norton, 1975]) and including V. R. Berghahn (Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 [St Martin’s Press, 2nd ed., 1993]). The 1913 events are described in some detail in Jack Beatty’s The Lost History of 1914: How the Great War Was Not Inevitable (Bloomsbury, 2012).
For the 1912 shift in German defense spending, see David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe 1904–1914 (Oxford University Press, 2000). British concerns with the German naval buildup are widely documented, but it is striking that the Germans had no naval war plan in 1914. See, for example, the initial volume of their official naval history Krieg zur See, which the British translated, in the Royal Navy Historical Branch. For British thinking in 1914 and early 1915, I relied on the letters Prime Minister H. H. Asquith sent to his mistress describing cabinet meetings and policy: Michael and Eleanor Brock, eds., H. H. Asquith Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford University Press, 1982).
My source for British blockade policy and for its impact on German society is the official British history of the blockade: A. C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of Germany and of the Countries Associated with Her in the Great War: Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey 1914–1918 (CID Historical Section, 1937, published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961). This book also discusses the German decision to begin the U-boat offensive and its failure, as it was understood in Germany during the fall of 1917. I have also benefited from Nicholas A. Lambert’s Planning for Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). He describes the way in which the blockade was watered down, not least to avoid unduly antagonizing the United States.